About five years ago, I stopped dieting.
For years, in my quest for a more muscular, ripped body, I had tried every diet in the book, or at least in book form— Fit for Life, The Atkins Diet, The Zone— in all their high carb, low fat; low carb, high fat; high protein, low protein, no protein permutations. I also had tried every supplement hailed as the new cure-all, from creatine to fish oil. Had someone told me that sacrificing puppies at midnight during the winter solstice would assure me washboard abs and bulging biceps, I have no doubt my neighborhood would have been decked with flyers every Christmas begging,
Have your seen my dog?
Back then, I am ashamed to say, I was credulous of any diet with even the thinnest veneer of science. The very deconstructive tools acquired in college that should have made me suspicious of the specious claims put forth by these smarmy authors only made me all the more eager to believe any half-baked book that began by exposing the hidden, morally-bankrupt motives lurking behind mainstream science, medical opinion, and the nefarious FDA. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that the best way to avoid scrutiny of one’s diet plan or supplement was to point a contemptuous finger at someone else.
But after years of counting carbs, calories and grams of fat, I stopped. I stopped not because these diets didn’t work. They had, in fact, worked all too well. You could see the veins in my stomach and I looked great in a Speedo— no small feat. Of course, I wasn’t as muscular as I wanted, opting to look “ripped” as opposed to “bulging.” In my naiveté, I hadn’t realized that steroids were the fastest way to attain both a ripped and a muscular physique. Had I known that, I probably would have gone on the Testosterone Diet, as well.
No, I stopped out of sheer exhaustion.
As it happened, my moratorium on dieting coincided with another change of habit: I decided to fulfill my childhood fantasy of becoming a gymnast. Granted, I had already missed my chance at becoming the next Mary Lou Retton, but learning how to do a back flip sure sounded fun, so I started taking adult gymnastics classes. While my past eating habits had given me a sleek figure, I found that my old diets could not possibly support my changing metabolism as I learned to perform back tucks, scissor kicks, and front handsprings. To keep up, I started eating more generously. Not only did I stop regulating my food intake so obsessively, but I also stopped judging my fitness level based on what I saw in the mirror. Instead, I judged my progress based on how well I performed on the floor or the pommel horse.
My foray into gymnastics, however, didn’t completely quell my obsession with food. My more generous eating habits erased those visible veins in my stomach, triggering all sorts of paranoid anxieties about what I should or should not ingest, how much, and how often.
What the hell is a balanced diet, anyway?
I remember lamenting to our own Jamie Dreyer. Jamie advised me to listen to my body instead of every diet guru who came along. But I insisted I couldn’t hear my body, the residual din of all those books with their promises of a fitter frame drowning out any other voice.
Fortunately, Jamie strong-armed me into training for an Olympic distance triathlon. Under the heavy demands of training, my body began to speak up. I found myself craving— yes, craving— fruits and vegetables. Chocolate, the only food I had ever considered worth craving, no longer presented itself as the existential crisis of freewill that it once was. Rather, my ingestion of sweets and meats began to moderate itself, my eating habits becoming more attuned to the contingencies of rest and physical exertion.
The triathlon also disabused me of the notion that shape or size provides, in any way, a reliable indication of health or fitness. Over the four months of intense training, my physical appearance didn’t change all that much; I certainly didn’t attain those washboard abs with popping veins that so many fitness magazines tout as the hallmark of health. But I was stronger, more energized, happier. Moreover, many of my fellow triathletes sported bodies that our present culture would probably pathologize as overweight, perhaps, even obese. But these would-be obese bodies kicked ass on land and in water. These were not obese bodies; they were ample ones.
But if body size has little to do with health and performance, why does the rhetoric of obesity hold such sway in our national consciousness? And how is it that the same voices that tell us obesity threatens our body politic are also the same voices that present us with emaciated and/or steroided bodies as the pinnacles of health?
My sense is that the war on obesity dovetails with another, undeclared, but nonetheless devastating war on other bodies deemed equally undesirable and disposable. First, the terms obese and fat are not gender-neutral; they glom most insistently and perhaps most damagingly onto female bodies. The ugly epithet man-boobs used to disparage undesirable weight gain in men only punctuates the thinly disguised, if it is disguised at all, misogyny that accompanies most attributions of fatness. Second, the overweight or obese body is more than likely also the working poor body, whose food choices and activity levels are greatly circumscribed by economic realities. Organic food and state-of-the-art gyms do not come cheap, thinness being not just a badge of health but also a sign of status in today’s culture. Whipping up fears of becoming fat is a great way to sell the upwardly mobile every possible diet book, pill, pharmaceutical, and/or surgical procedure imaginable. Finally, fat serves as a whitewashed sign for the nonwhite. It is no coincidence that the very few Hollywood bodies described as curvaceous, voluptuous, or, as is au courant, bootylicious happen to also be nonwhite. (And you know we as a society are in trouble when Beyonce and J-Lo qualify as curvy and full-figured.) That is why I cringe whenever I hear seemingly well-intentioned fitness enthusiasts talk disparagingly about “being fat”: a war on obesity can’t help but also be a war on women, the working class, and people of color.
Another disturbing aspect of the war on obesity is how blatantly and unapologetically fat (female/poor/nonwhite) bodies are held up for public scrutiny, allowing everybody else (which is to say, any body intent on distancing itself from those abject bodies) to make authorial claims about them. How irresistible, how imperative to map damning narratives onto those fraught, fat bodies:
Clearly, they can’t help but binge on fast-food. How else did they get so fat? It’s kinda their own fault, tho’, right? They could have always made a healthier choice.
Figured as both compulsive and free-willed, the obese body, denied any authority to speak for itself, becomes a receptacle for all our anxieties around health, illness, class, gender and race. Obese (female/poor/nonwhite) bodies bear the brunt of our contempt.
What is even more distressing is how ubiquitous this contempt is. We at Blog Further are just as guilty of reproducing it as anybody else. Take, for instance, Robin Follet’s most recent post entitled Gobble Gobble Gobble. An otherwise generous writer intimately acquainted with the plight of marginalized lives and realities, Follet starts off his post ranting against crass consumerism, only to turn his attack against gluttony— an unremarkable (in that this significant shift in thought goes unmarked) and unfortunate rhetorical move that inevitably misleads him to place the blame for our nation’s oil and shopping addiction squarely at the feet of fat people:
Here’s what we’ve told ourselves: gluttony is good. There’s only so much, and we’re going to get as much as we can. Well, we have, and now we’re fat— literally and metaphorically.
I have no doubt Follet would be mortified by my present critique, that he would be filled with shame and remorse if he thought for one second that his remarks might come across as even remotely thoughtless or contemptuous to someone for whom “fatness” or “obesity” was a complex, contentious question, rather than a sterile, moralizing fact. Far from exposing any personality flaw or intellectual shortcoming, Follet’s rhetorical slip demonstrates just how insidious the rhetoric of obesity is. Our present culture offers us only the thinnest of heuristics for thinking about our bodies: Thin equals health equals wealth equals power. Faced with such a drop dead elegant theory, what kind of cognitive courage must one muster to put forth even the humblest of counter narratives?
Thankfully, the past decade or so has seen the emergence of an ample body of literature capable of generating sustainable, inclusive alternatives to the war on obesity. Personally, I have found Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Epidemics of the Will” as well as her book of poetry Fat Art, Thin Art incredibly helpful in thinking through these issues. Another promising development— pointed out to me by one of our more astute readers— is the Health At Every Size (HAES) Movement. According to Linda Bacon, professor of nutrition and biology at City College of San Francisco and author of Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight,
the war on obesity has taken its toll. Extensive ‘collateral damage’ has resulted: Food and body preoccupation, self-hatred, eating disorders, discrimination, poor health… Few of us are at peace with our bodies, whether because we’re fat or because we fear becoming fat.
Calling Health At Every Size “the new peace movement,” Bacon summarizes the philosophy of HAES:
Very simply, it acknowledges that good health can best be realized independent from considerations of size. It supports people— of all sizes— in addressing health directly by adopting healthy behaviors.
Bacon does not replicate the ugly formula by which growing “waists” become synonymous with growing “waste.” Rather, her research and writing on HAES are part and parcel of her work on sustainable agriculture.
As a movement, HAES boasts a host of exciting scholars, researchers, organizations and journals. In addition to Bacon’s book, I have already added the following to my Amazon Wish List (hint, hint):
Big Fat Lies: The Truth about Your Weight and Your Health by Glenn A. Gaesser
Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologize For Your Size by Marilyn Wann
Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic by J. Eric Oliver
The Obesity Myth: Why American’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health by Paul Campos
Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity by Kathleen Lebesco
For those interested in becoming more involved in the HAES movement, check out the Association for Size Diversity and Health as well as The Body Positive, a non-profit organization committed to promoting HAES principles among children and teens. The Body Positive has a great DVD series entitled BodyTalk in which teens and preteens talk about their bodies, their anxieties, their coping strategies, and their personal successes. If only we fitness professionals and sports enthusiasts could be as eloquent and smart as these young adults:
Allen Durgin is the editor of Blog Further: A Workout for Your Body and Your Brain. He would love to hear what books, websites, magazines, movies, etc., others have found helpful in cultivating a healthier attitude toward body shape and size.
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December 8th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Hey man,
It’s an interesting theory (the thin=health=wealth=power equation). I don’t think it holds true outside of the U.S. bubble, though. In many (most?) other countries–”developed,” “developing” and “third world”– extreme thinness is directly related to poverty.
December 9th, 2008 at 8:14 am
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December 9th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
The health industry all over the world profits big time from publicity and advertising keeping people fat and instead of targetting the source of the problem, they focus on selling diet pills that do not work or endanger mental health. Processed foods are a huge market and depend on pressuring consumers into becoming larger and hooking them on their high sugar content. Discrimination just leads these consumers deeper down into the vicious cycle so in turn they go out and eat, and fitness junkies are sold the idea that being oveweight is disgusting so they go out and consume voraciously from a complete different market.
Any media that promotes discrimination and deludes people from accepting and loving who they are merely represents the hidden agenda of corporations that want to force you into massive consumption of what they are selling. It takes more than an average educated mind to see the paradox here yet take a stand against tactics of such vile nature. Soon enough they will be selling us drugs to forget how they traumatized us in the first place and the snake will bite its tail again.
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